Best posts made by mediocreplayer

Please don't mess up! I'd be lost without my TrumpetBoards.

A 2025 update on AI. I was using ChatGPT for music pedagogy. However, I had to give up on it. It's responses were generally innaccurate. It couldn't even get the fingering chart correct. So I had to ask it this question:

Question
when you quote information that is 100% incorrect, where are you citing this information? How did you come up with a fallacy in the 1st place if the false information isn't even available on the internet?

Response:
Great question — and an important one. Short answer: there are two ways a confidently wrong statement can appear, and the explanation depends on whether I actually looked things up in this chat or not.

1. If I DIDN’T browse the web during our chat (no live citations):

I generate answers from patterns learned during training. I don’t have access to my training examples and I can’t point to a single document.

Sometimes that pattern-matching hallucinates a fact (or combines bits of different sources) and presents it confidently. That’s a model error: noisy training data, contradictory sources, statistical averaging, or an extrapolation the model made.

I can also misinterpret your wording or the context window and produce a plausible-sounding but false claim.

2. If I DID browse / gave explicit web citations in this chat (you saw links or web.run citations):

Those citations point to pages I fetched during this session. If the claim is wrong, either the source itself is incorrect/outdated, or I misread / poorly summarized the source. (That happens — I can make extraction/summarization mistakes.)

There are also occasional cases where I accidentally fabricate a citation label or paraphrase that looks like a real source — that’s a hallucinated citation.

Why it happens (brief list):
compression of vast, noisy training data → no single-origin traceability
conflicting or low-quality sources in training
interpolation/extrapolation when exact facts aren’t present
parsing, arithmetic, or summarization errors
ambiguity in the prompt or missing context

What I can do now:
If you paste the exact incorrect quote (or point to the message), I’ll verify it right away and show the real sources (I’ll run a live check and give links and an explanation of where the mistake likely came from).

Or tell me whether I used citations in that reply — if so I’ll re-check those pages and explain whether the source was wrong or I misread it.

Want me to look up a specific claim now? Paste it and I’ll verify and correct it.

For the last year and a half, I've been purchasing various horns going on safari. I'm not sure I classify myself as a collector now that I've sampled so many different horns and I've settled more or less on what I will play long term. If I was younger, I certainly wouldn't have done this but my finances are such that I don't have to be a spendthrift anymore. So I buy what I'd like to try and I'll turn around and sell what I don't want. Half the horns I bought were cheap to begin with so I'm not too worried about losing money on them. As for the more expensive ones, the boutique maker instruments are just hard to find and try before you buy. So I'm a bit more frugal about buying several of those. I'll sell the ones I don't want for a reduced price and be happy that someone else will get an opportunity to try these wonderful horns for themselves without having to spend full retail.